Olga Petrovna Vaulina painted her work “Composition in the Workshop of M. V. Matyushin” while studying at the Academy of Arts. Like Nikolay Ivanovich Kostrov, she attended the studio of spatial realism led by Professor Mikhail Vasilyevich Matyushin.

During those years, Matyushin, an artist and a teacher, was engaged in developing the so-called “extended vision” and solving the issue of the geometrization of new spatial concepts. Some of his students became fascinated by his ideas as well. During her studies at the Academy, Olga Vaulina was also taught by Alexey Yeremeyevich Karyov and Alexander Alexandrovich Osmerkin, but it was Matyushin whom she considered her mentor.

Olga Vaulina was born into the family of the famous ceramist Pyotr Kuzmich Vaulin, who ran a ceramics workshop in Abramtsevo. In 1921, she entered the Academy of Arts. As a student, she took part in the scientific work of the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture.

After graduation, Olga Vaulina left for Uzbekistan but later returned to Leningrad, where she began working as an illustrator of textbooks for the peoples of the North. She also took part in painting facades of Leningrad buildings.

In March and April of 1930, she participated in the final exhibition of the Collective of Extended Observation. The works of this exhibition demonstrated the use of Mikhail Matyushin’s method of “extended vision”. He was guided by the ideas of the all-encompassing unity of the world.

The method proved useful in the eagerness to break from the clear distinction between separate objects and the geometrization of forms, as well as placing the emphasis on color in art. In 1933, Mikhail Matyushin and his students published “The Reference Book of Color”, which to this day remains a unique textbook on color studies. The students made hand-painted illustrations for the book.

In 1934, Olga Vaulina reentered the Academy of Arts and studied for three years in the studio of Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Osmerkin. During the Great Patriotic War, she lived in Leninsk-Kuznetsky, Kemerovo Oblast.